State Clung To Flimsy Murder Case Against Lapointe

Prosecution should be on trial for case against Lapointe, Colin McEnroe suggests

One of the many, many people who eventually concluded that Richard Lapointe did not kill his wife's grandmother was a guy named Joseph H. Brooks.

After one of Lapointe's more recent bad days in court — and there have been a lot of them — Brooks told writer Donald Connery the latest setback was "as much a perversion of justice as all the proceedings against this man" and that Lapointe "was convicted on lies, violations of the law" by people who either ignored or took advantage of his mental impairments.

No big deal. Lots of people have said that. "60 Minutes" said that. Arthur Miller said that

But Brooks was the police captain whose detectives squeezed a confession out of Lapointe. You don't see cops turn against their own cases very often. Brooks died a year later.

There are still people who think Lapointe is guilty. The prosecutor Rosita Creamer never backed down, and neither did Karen Fiddler, one of the daughters of the murdered woman, Bernice Martin. We can now toss into the mix Carmen Espinosa, the former prosecutor and now Supreme Court justice who turned a verbal flamethrower on her colleagues last week when they ordered a new trial for Lapointe (after turning him down in 1996). Throw in the aforementioned two detectives, Michael Morrissey and Paul Lombardo, and you've got a basketball lineup. I'm not sure you could get a soccer team at this point.

If that new trial ever happens, I'm guessing the 69-year-old ex-dishwasher won't be the one on trial. In the hands of the right defense counsel, the state will be on trial.

Two years after the murder, they pulled in Lapointe, a guy with a congenital brain malformation called Dandy Walker Syndrome. They kept him for 9.5 hours of interrogation, none of it taped. He provided three confessions. The first two were discarded as too blurred and flimsy, but finally, like Goldilocks, they got one that was "just right." Even so, Lapointe was off on a lot of the basic details of the crime. He made the kinds of mistakes that might make a more scrupulous cop wonder.

The whole case stinks in half a dozen other ways. The state has shown a stupefying lack of interest in running some of its DNA evidence through a database or checking for a match with Fred Merrill, a career criminal caught three days after the Martin murder, three miles away, committing a home invasion rape that bore striking resemblances to the Martin murder. Merrill was seen in a bar near Martin's apartment on the night of the murder, and a witness saw a guy who looked like him — and not at all like Lapointe — running fast, away from the area of the crime.

Merrill has led a colorful, 40-year life of crime, punctuated by multiple prison escapes. He was paroled in 2012 was was back in prison two years later. I'm not saying he did it, but the state's lack of interest in him as a suspect is peculiar. Apparently, it was easier to let Lapointe sit in prison for a quarter of a century.

Easy. It's easy to lock somebody up in this country. It was supposed to be hard. Remember? Our founders talked about it all the time. But the U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prison population. One out of 100 of us is incarcerated. Sweet land of liberty.

Lapointe's case makes him a poster boy. You don't have to have any physical evidence. You don't have to record the interrogation and confession, even though you have the equipment there in the station. You don't have to take into account the suspect's mental limitations or get a lawyer to sit in. You don't have to follow all the leads or eliminate the other suspects.

If the state retries Lapointe, he'll be found not guilty. It's a waste of resources, but maybe he deserves a clearing of his name. Maybe Bernice Martin deserves some real police work about who killed her. Or maybe a new trial will make some other mess we can't even anticipate right now.

Yeah. It would have been so much better to have done this right the first time.

Colin McEnroe appears from 1 to 2 p.m. weekdays on WNPR-FM (90.5) and blogs at courantblogs.com/colin-mcenroe. He can be reached at Colin@wnpr.org.